ROCANVILLE - One day back in 2000 Jake Sarazin and his son needed some sand for their young turkeys.
Pail in-hand, they headed into a sandy field along the Qu’Appelle Valley, not far from Rocanville.
It was to be a simple task, fill the pail and go home to their turkeys.
But, it turned out to be so much more. One of them spied what turned out to be a stone point, one that an earlier civilization would have attached to an arrow, or spear for hunting.
Finding such ‘points’ are not that unusual in Saskatchewan, although finds become rarer as the years pass.
With the blessing of the land owner and the Saskatchewan Heritage Conservation Branch in the province Jake and his late wife Brenda, who both had a strong interest in history and archaeology, would scour the property with visits spanning several years, rains and wind helping unearth new finds as time passed.
On one such trip the ‘point’ they found was different from the rest.
“They realized some of the artifacts looked usual,” said Dr. Thomas Richards, Executive Director of the Heritage Conservation Branch and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow with the Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University, Australia.
Research followed and it was found to be a ‘Folsom point’, and their finds suddenly went from interesting to amazing since Folsom points date back about 12,000 years to those who were thought to be the first peoples to inhabit the Americas during the final glacial episodes of the late Pleistocene period.
The points are referred to as Folsom points because the earliest find was excavated in 1927 near the small town of Folsom, New Mexico. A finely made stone point was found in direct association with the skeleton of Bison antiquus, a large form of bison 25 per cent larger than their descendant’s, the modern bison. This discovery at Folsom demonstrated for the first time that First Nations people were present in North America at the end of the last ice age and hunted extinct megafauna around 12,000 years ago.
That some of the points found by the Sarazins are Folsom points “is really quite special,” said Richards.
“The two best-known styles of Paleoindian projectile points are called ‘Clovis’ and ‘Folsom’,” explains www.crowcanyon.org “Both have a wide, central groove, also called a ‘flute,’ which allowed them to be attached to the split end of wooden spear shafts. Clovis points, which were made early in the Paleoindian period, have been found throughout North America, most often associated with the bones of mammoths. Folsom points were made later, and they are found mostly in the central and western parts of the continent, often in association with the bones of bison.”
Phillippa Sutherland Richards and Thomas Richards detail the find in an article for a 2019 article published in Saskatchewan Archaeology Quarterly.
“Once they recovered a partial Folsom point, Brenda and Jake knew they had discovered one of the oldest sites in Saskatchewan,” detailed the article. “After extensive internet research they also learned what it was that Jake had been calling “turtle backs.” These distinctive, wafer-thin, plano-convex flakes, made of Knife River flint, were actually channel flakes removed from preforms to create the flutes characteristic of Folsom points.”
Dr. Richards told Yorkton This Week the find remains an important one, as it is further evidence “of early First Nations occupation of what is now Saskatchewan.”
“This collection is important, not only because of what is in it, but also because of Brenda and Jake’s documentation,” noted the Phillippa Sutherland Richards and Thomas Richards article. “Their notes make it clear exactly where the site was located and what was found there. Finds from this site were separated from other site finds and were catalogued, photographed and stored in labelled bags. They also completed a Saskatchewan Archaeological Resource Record (SARR) and SARR updates and provided brief permit reports and artifact catalogues to the Heritage Conservation Branch.”
For Richards the find would be one he would follow more closely as he began developing a research project on early First Nations settlement of the province from 10,000 to over 13,000 years ago and came quickly to realize the importance of the collection.
When Brenda died a few years ago the collection of artifacts was donated to the Rocanville & District Museum.
Most of the collection is held in storage at the Rocanville Museum. The Sarazin Collection comprises of 1,885 items mostly made of stone but also ceramic, bone, tooth, shell and post-contact materials.
With permission, Richards has been allowed to take pieces from the museum for greater study.
Points created in different time periods of habitation in North America changed over time and archaeologists have dated these stylistic and technological changes, so that if you find a Folsom-style point, you know the age range when that style of point was made. From excavated and radiocarbon dated sites in the US, we know Folsom points were made by First Nations people from ca. 12,700 to 11,500 years ago (or 10,700-9500 BC).
Richards said it is interesting that even some 12,000 years ago the bison was being hunted in North America albeit a much larger version.
Bison antiquus was “25 per cent larger than the modern day bison,” he said.
The original Folsom find of course redefined thinking in terms of when the first people arrived on the continent.
It was believed up until that find “First Nations people only arrived in North America 2-3000 years ago,” said Richards. This discovery revolutionized thinking and pushed the estimated date of the start of human colonization back to the end of the Ice Age, estimated to be some 10,000-12,000 years ago at that time.
Given the age of artifacts found at the Qu’Appelle Valley site, one might have anticipated they would have been buried under layers of soil, but in that respect the Sarazins may have gotten a bit lucky.
“The field was quite sandy and was being cultivated at the time of discovery in 2000,” noted Richards, who added cultivation opened the field to greater wind and water erosion and the artifacts became exposed.
Jake once told Richards that if there was a big wind they’d head to the sandy field to see what new pieces had been exposed.
But, what might lie unearthed nearby?
“The field in which Brenda and Jake found the Folsom material was significantly lower than an adjacent nearby field on the other side of a narrow track between the two,” noted the Phillippa Sutherland Richards and Thomas Richards article. “The recorded site area had been ploughed repeatedly and the area was heavily wind-eroded. The field across the track had remained pasture for a long time, either having never been ploughed or ploughed a long time ago and returned to pasture. The ground surface there appears to be around 75 cm higher than the site area. Could the Folsom site extend to the less eroded sands of this quarter section as speculated by Brenda a decade ago?”
Richards hopes to find out.
“I’m keen to get back there and test the other side of the track,” he said, adding there is a possibility, slight as it may be, that a Folsom era camp site might lie beneath the ground.
“There’s no known intact Folsom site in Saskatchewan,” he said, adding there have been Folsom points discovered in other Saskatchewan spots over the years.
The first step of a discovery will be to get the landowners permission to dig a few small test pits that would minimally disturb any deposits that may be present, while informing on the further potential of the site for further excavations.
“I was working on that before COVID hit,” said Richards, adding he hopes to get that discussion going again soon. “. . .We’ll see if we can progress things,” adding landowner co-operation is “usually pretty good”.
While admitting it is speculation, there could be evidence of a camp, fire places, discarded stone tools including worn out scrapers used for preparing animal hides.
There could be animal bones with the ‘points’ allowing for identification of the animals hunted, bison likely, but other species too, said Richards. Bones also help with radiocarbon dating a site.
The test pits might reveal nothing, but there is the chance a major discovery is waiting beneath the ground, one Richards hopes to be digging for soon.
